Arguing the Case for Assassination

Assassination has unfortunately gotten a bad rap in this country, not because it is immoral or even impractical, but because our own victims have, for the most part, been popular figures, such as Abe Lincoln, Martin Luther King and the Kennedys, Jack and Bobby. But I say it’s time to reassess the practice.

There seems to be a gentleman’s agreement not to whack someone else’s national leader, and if I were a president, prime minister, emperor, king or run-of-the-mill despot, I could certainly see the attraction of such an arrangement. But, as I’m not, I think it’s a pretty lousy policy.

For instance, why shouldn’t we try to find an efficient way to remove Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the imams who, thanks to Jimmy Carter, run Iran? After all, we know, based on the 2009 uprising in Tehran, that these are not universally beloved figures. We also know, as Churchill prophesized about Nazi Germany, that a future war, possibly of the nuclear variety, with Iran is inevitable. Wouldn’t it be worth killing a handful of Iranian tyrants today than risk the lives of untold thousands at some time in the future?

Besides, in spite of all the high-minded claptrap about assassination being a terribly unenlightened alternative to diplomacy, it seems pretty obvious that England, France and the U.S., have been trying to blow Gaddafi to Kingdom Come for the past several months. They’re just not doing a very good job of it.

Although it was apparently the Taliban who knocked off Ahmed Wali Karzai, Hamid Karzai’s half-brother, I’m sure that Eric Holder is scared stiff that the gun used in the assassination will be traced back to yet another ATF “Fast and Furious” snafu.

Holder’s enabler, Barack Obama, is boasting that during the last quarter, even as our unemployment numbers continued to soar, he managed to raise a shocking $86 million for his political war chest. No wonder the goofus-in-chief is so confident that the economy has turned around. For my part, I think that anyone who kicked in to Obama’s slush fund should be ashamed of himself, and should, like Hester Prynne, be branded with a scarlet “S” for schmuck.

What I have come to understand about Democrats is that they’re pack animals. It explains why, in spite of all objective evidence, they remain convinced that Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann are a pair of dumb bunnies, and Nancy Pelosi and Barbara Boxer are regular little Einsteins.

It also explains why they don’t raise any serious objections to anything the alpha dog does. So, whereas they had conniption fits when George W. Bush misspoke, they didn’t even wince when Obama mentioned our 57 states, and they thought it was downright adorable when he repeatedly referred to the Marine Corpse.

When Bush passed the Patriot Act, sent terrorists off to Gitmo and increased the national debt, Democrats insisted he was a loose, fascistic, cannon. However, when Obama extends the Patriot Act, keeps Gitmo open and sends the national debt soaring off the charts, they somehow conclude he belongs on Mt. Rushmore.

Perhaps we should all have realized how deranged Obama was when he claimed that, thanks to his charisma, America would once again be the most respected nation on the face of the earth.

Once elected, he mainly displayed his grasp of foreign policy by bowing and scraping. The world hadn’t seen such an obvious pretense of humility in decades, at least going back to Roland Young’s Uriah Heep in David Copperfield.

As Obama toured the globe, he seemed to take delight in denigrating America’s decency and generosity, while berating us for a few real and a great many imaginary faults. In the years since, he has insulted such allies as England, Poland and Israel, while bending his knee to any number of tyrants. Along the way, he broke the astonishing news that Muslims played a major role in the creation of the United States.

He has gone so far overboard in playing up to our sworn enemies that millions of Americans are now convinced he’s a Muslim. I don’t happen to share that belief. Judging by the ministers he is drawn to — racists such as Jeremiah Wright and Wallace Charles Smith — I believe that, like Jesse Jackson, Van Jones, Eric Holder and Al Sharpton, he is simply a garden variety black bigot.

Moreover, the irony of his constant curtsying to the Arab and Muslim world is that recent polls show that America is disliked even more vehemently in the Middle East in 2011 than it was in 2008.

Speaking of Allah’s faithful, the one thing that all the uprisings that have taken place over the past several months in Syria, Egypt, Yemen and Libya, prove is that these people are quite capable of staging massive demonstrations once they put their mind to it. And that’s even when other people are using them for target practice!

I bring this up because, post 9/11, whenever I pointed out that I never saw a single instance either in America or anywhere else of peace-loving Muslims demonstrating against Islamic terrorists, I was scolded by liberal loons. They kept insisting that most Muslims were wonderful people who simply feared for their lives if they showed their true feelings.

Am I the only person who finds it odd that the folks demonstrating in the streets of Cairo, Lebanon and Tripoli, apparently think they have less to fear than their relatives living in Dearborn, Michigan?.

About Burt Prelutsky

Burt Prelutsky, a very nice person once you get to know him, has been a humor columnist for the L.A. Times and a movie critic for Los Angeles magazine. As a freelancer, he has written for the New York Times, Washington Times, TV Guide, Modern Maturity, Emmy, Holiday, American Film, and Sports Illustrated.
For television, he has written for Dragnet, McMillan & Wife, MASH, Mary Tyler Moore, Rhoda, Bob Newhart, Family Ties, Dr. Quinn and Diagnosis Murder. In addition, he has written a batch of terrific TV movies. View Burt’s IMDB profile.
Talk about being well-rounded, he plays tennis and poker... and rarely cheats at either.
He lives in the San Fernando Valley, where he takes his marching orders from a wife named Yvonne and a dog named Angel.Author website: http://www.burtprelutsky.com/